Within a family local area network (for example the local area network—wireless or wired—created by the Internet gateway in a home), the number of multimedia features associated with the connected electronic devices has increased significantly in recent years. These devices include wireless audio speakers, USB flash drives, presence detectors, headphones, etc.
In order to interact with these devices (to configure them or view their contents, for example), and facilitate the user experience when interacting with these electronic devices, the Applicant has proposed, in addition to a residential gateway (such as Livebox® for example), a communication device in the form of a multimedia box, in particular for sharing content between household devices. Such a communication device, marketed under the name “Homepoint”®, functions as a hub for all connected WiFi/Bluetooth household devices. In one current implementation, when pairing this hub device with the residential gateway, synchronization occurs via WiFi and the hub device identified on the network (such as “Homepoint”) can then share its content with the gateway's local area network (LAN), and in particular with all WiFi/Bluetooth devices connected to this LAN.
Once the residential devices have been connected, in order to play music or a movie or view photos or files, one simply selects the corresponding option on a programming interface provided on the Homepoint hub device in order to choose a content source among the household devices. The hub device is also connected to one or more playback devices (by a jack for example for music) for playing or viewing the selected content.
However, the hub device is not configured (or protected) for providing access to external applications. For example, one cannot use such a device to access cloud storage services (“cloud storage” in the following) or to receive streamed content (“streaming” in the following) for subscribers to such streaming services.